“We wish to suggest a structure for the salt of deoxyribose nucleic acid (D.N.A.). This structure has novel features which are of considerable biological interest.” These are the opening sentences of an article written by J. D. Watson and F. H. C. Frick of the Medical Research Council Unit for the Study of Molecular Structure of Biological Systems, Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge. This article offering their seminal description of DNA was first published in April 1953 by Nature, and appears now a half century later on Nature’s website in its Genome Gateway.
When I studied zoology in college in 1958, my textbook was the standard MacMillan College Zoology, Sixth Edition, printed in 1951. I have kept it in my library because the gee whiz avalanche of knowledge that has tumbled forth from biologists for the past half century has made the book so quaint today. Here is what it says about genes: “Although the exact physical nature of the gene is not known, there is some evidence for regarding it as a large protein molecule.” A good guess; nothing else.
Things moved along slowly in biology in the first half of the 20th century. The MacMillan Company felt it necessary only to update its standard text every decade or so. After its initial printing in 1912, there were new editions in 1926, 1931, 1936, 1942, and 1951. Two years after the book I used was printed, Watson and Crick said in their Nature article: “It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material.” That notice flicked the pebble that launched an avalanche of insight into genes.
Genomics is now an arena of knowledge in which change is constant and what is known expands at a withering pace. This science also builds up enormous information stockpiles such as the material accumulated in the FlyBase located at Indiana University. The drawing of the fly thorax illustrating this column is one of the 262 photographs and drawings in the Body Parts Viewer. The thorax originates at the Revue Suisse de Zoologie. The Body Parts Viewer is one of many swarms of facts in the Fly Base, which is one of many collections amassed to form Nature’s genomics opus.
James Watson was a young man when he and Francis Crick illuminated the double helix of DNA. He later was “founding director of the Human Genome Project, the largest coordinated biological research project in history,” as Long Island’s online history brags of their adopted son who heads the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. In February 2001, there were dual announcements of the sequencing of the human genome by the project Watson had initially headed and by Celera Genomics led by Craig Venter. The former was published online by Nature.com and the latter by the website of Science Magazine. Both publications announced that all of the information they had placed online would remain free for anyone to access. Nature.com subsequently transformed its material into a Genome Gateway that is steadily updated as discoveries continue.
A visit to online genomics is a gee whiz experience, just to dip into the deluge and to sift a bit through the debris of the ongoing discovery avalanche. (If you need some introduction to the topic, you can wade in from the shallow end by clicking here: Genomics Primer.) Whatever your level of expertise, there is wonderment in seeing so much. Without the Internet you could see the merest fraction of what lies virtually before you online. To think it further through, is it not in fact possible that this genome science that seeks sense in staggering detail owes much of its advance to digital interconnection and interfacing. Without the Internet genomics would probably still be moving along decade-by-decade, not nanosecond-by-nanosecond.
Maybe it would not be moving at all.